After the success of his blockbuster film Crazy Rich Asians, which raked in $238 million, director Jon M. Chu was preparing to roll out his next tentpole film, the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical In the Heights, when the pandemic crisis hit the U.S. in mid-March. Suddenly, he was faced with a wrenching decision: to debut his splashy Latinx song-and-dance epic set in Washington Heights on a streaming service or hold out for movie theaters in some unforeseeable future in which movie theaters are open again.

In a series of phone calls, Chu, writer-producer Miranda, and executives at Warner Brothers struggled to create plausible options with almost no information.

“The studio laid out the different scenarios for us,” Chu says. “They were actually open to how we wanted to do it because they also did not have the answers. And it wasn’t one conversation that came to the conclusion. It was: ‘Let’s have three or four different conversations as every week is a different story.’ Even to this day. We still don’t quite fully know what is going to be happening in these theaters. So you never know. But that’s where we landed, that next year for us—because it’s coming out June 18 of next year—was best for us.”

On this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, Chu and film editor Myron Kerstein describe how they came to the decision to hold out for a theatrical release in a world where theaters may struggle to attract an audience ever again.

Universal recently diverted Trolls World Tour to Amazon Prime, charging $20 for a streaming rental, and managed to earn nearly $100 million. But this wasn’t what Chu had in mind for his movie. “For me, we made this movie to be on the big screen, a musical of this scope, of this size,” he says. “We shot it anamorphic so it could span the whole screen, the way the colors are, the way you experienced this as a community where people should be singing along, dancing in the aisles. That is something [that]—again, not all my movies, but this movie in particular, [and] Crazy Rich Asians in particular—had a very specific purpose of getting people together. That is part of the experience, not just the movie itself. And Myron and I have talked a lot about how movies affected us when we were young and its place in our culture now of getting people out of their homes, out of their cell phones, and together, to be with each other. So for this one in particular, that was a big thing for us. Of course, with Warner Brothers, they have HBO Max, which is coming. And so there’s always the temptation to put it over there. But obviously that was also not ready yet, about to come out. But at that time it wasn’t fully. And in the end of the day, that was not the experience that I particularly wanted our movie to be. And I know Lin agreed with that.”

For the young lead actors in In the Heights—Anthony Ramos, Stephanie Beatriz, Melissa Barrera, Corey Hawkins and Leslie Grace—this was supposed to be their breakout moment. But it would require a multimillion-dollar marketing campaign to build their media profiles in advance of the movie, something Chu had done with the cast of Crazy Rich Asians. And with almost no media bandwidth or likelihood of in-person appearances on TV, it simply wasn’t possible.

“So you’re building an ecosystem around these actors to make them stars,” he says. “And in a way it’s almost bigger than the movie itself, because after this movie you’re creating a new lane for these actors, and Crazy Rich Asians was all Asians from all around the world. And in In the Heights, it’s mostly Latinx actors, young, some vets, but really putting them on the map so that their next movie that’s not with us, they’re a star in that movie. And that is the real power of when you make a movie with a studio that has that kind of representation, and you get to cast people who never got the chance to be in those roles because they’re always the side characters, always playing stereotypes. And [in] this one they really get to blossom, and that is the bigger lasting legacy of these movies. I believe In the Heights will have that, and that takes time. That takes a whole mechanism of a company spending tens of millions of dollars getting behind that. So that was also a big part of my decision.”

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All of this, of course, hinges on whether people will return to movie theaters by next summer. Barring a widely distributed vaccine for COVID-19, there is already talk of movie theaters showing just one film across all of their screens and distancing theatergoers to meet health guidelines. One way or another, believes Chu, the theater experience will come back because audiences want the collective experience.

“We’re going to make it work, and we’re going to give reasons for people to come out, and we’re going to be safe about it, of course,” he says. “And to me, theaters, the movie theater experience, while it may evolve, I don’t think it ever—I don’t think it ever goes away. There’s the community experience. It’s like sports. You want to get out, and you want to be with people, and you want to experience this dream in the dark together. So you all can talk about it and debate about it afterwards. I don’t think that ever goes away.

“How, at what price, and what is it going to be, [will it be] the same as before? No,” he continues. “But I do think that cinema has a very big role to play in our culture, always will. And there’s big stories to tell. And those are really important for us all, as a world, to learn about each other and have empathy for each other and see stories that we aren’t used to seeing every day. I think it’s a huge key to unifying the world as it always has been. And not just, again, in your home looking at it by yourself, but actually being also with people to do that. Yeah. I have to believe in that. I cannot give up. I can’t give up on that dream. And so our job is to give reasons for it to exist.”

Listen to the full interview on this week’s episode of Inside the Hive, cohosted by Emily Jane Fox and Joe Hagan.